Chapter Text
Over the years, Robin has worked stupidly hard to get as far as she has in the FBI. Her skills as a codebreaker were carefully honed, her fluency in now five different languages was hard-won, and it was no easy feat learning how to wrestle her stubbornly uncoordinated body into fighting shape so that she could throw a punch as good as the rest of the recruits. So when she botches the Russian op and finds herself yanked out of the field and plopped squarely on Assistant Director Hopper’s shit list, she’s desperate to make things right — not least of all because Steve has been put on the Miss United States case. Without her.
Everyone at the office knows that Robin and Steve are a matched set. They’re partners. They do everything together. So when Hopper explicitly bans her from the task force, well, she and Steve both know they’ll find a way around it. It’s a fascinating case, after all. Domestic terrorist threats. A big flashy pageant. And, of course, approximately 50 drop-dead gorgeous beauty queens to go with it. So when Robin comes up with the idea to send an undercover in as one of the contestants, she’s almost certain it’ll be enough to get her back in her boss’s good graces. Only, the thing is, she didn’t anticipate that she’d somehow be the sole eligible agent.
There’s really just… no universe in which Robin can pull this off, no matter how convinced Steve is that she’s the right person (the only person available with the right gender) for the job. He really thinks she can do it, and maybe she should give that more weight considering he’s the sole reason she passed her field test in the first place, but the idea of Robin as a graceful, gracious pageant queen who has the perfect, pretty words for all manner of intrusive interview questions is — well, it’s laughable. Robin literally laughed out loud when Steve first suggested it.
But now she’s here, all waxed and plucked and polished and wrapped in some pastel monstrosity of a skirt suit being shepherded onto a bus by pageant director Martin Brenner, and Robin finds that it’s not all bad when sweet little Miss Indiana sits down next to her. It doesn’t take long, however, for Steve to reveal that the very same Chrissy Cunningham — Chrissy “All You Need Is A Light Jacket” Fucking Cunningham — is their best suspect. And he’s insisting that Robin question her.
So Robin takes Chrissy and the other girls out. Robin gets Chrissy and the other girls drunk. And Robin asks Chrissy if she’s ever committed a crime — and is met with Miss Indiana’s enormous eyes, shining and sad, as Chrissy admits in the guiltiest of voices to stealing a pair of red underwear from the mall that her mother called satan’s panties. (And, for the record, Robin had not found that any more adorable or insanely sexy than was strictly professional given their circumstances, because Robin is good at her job. But god.)
It’s just — it’s not her. There’s literally no chance that sweet little Miss Indiana is the same person threatening to blow up the Miss United States pageant and the women in it. And Hopper finally gives in and agrees when he announces that the Citizen has been caught, the threat negated, and that it’s time for Robin to drop out of the pageant. But Robin doesn’t think that’s right, either. She has a bad feeling that it’s not over yet. But sticking it out might mean she does it alone. Alone alone, without even Steve by her side. And it might mean that when her work at the pageant is done, she doesn’t have any other work to go back to.
ft. robin as gracie hart, chrissy as cheryl frasier/miss rhode island, steve as eric matthews, hopper as assistant director mcdonald, brenner as kathy morningside, henry creel as frank tobin, murray as victor melling, owens as stan fields, nancy as mary jo wright/miss texas, tammy as leslie davis/miss california, carol as alana krewson/miss hawaii, vickie as karen krantz/miss new york